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Amazing Sci-Fi Film Mis-drop (2013)

300 years in the future, a forensic accountant reviews the video stream from one mercenary's drop-pod which has been damaged during the initial stages of a colonial invasion. The biggest joys of short films is to see things that we would never see in feature length films. Whether it be the type of story or the way it was told, from filming technique to acting methods. In Ferand Peek’s Sci-fi thriller ‘Mis-Drop’ we get a unique view with a one shot from a mercenary’s drop-pod.

What do you do if you want to tell an epic sci-fi story set 300 years in the future but know from the outset that vast CG vistas and epic space battles are well out of your budgetary reach? Well if you’re New Zealand director Ferand Peek, you combine your knowledge of the genre with a spot of lateral thinking to literally reframe the problem into a compelling, claustrophobic tale of a rookie mercenary’s first disastrous combat mission. Peek joins us to share how he shepherded Mis-drop from concept to screen, teaching himself compositing along the way.

So when I started planning the project I hadn’t really done any visual effects before. I had worked on-set for years and felt that I could capture anything but I needed to do a little research to make sure that by the end of the shoot we had all the correct ingredients for the composite. Initially I wanted to do the visual effects before we shot the film and actually project them onto a real piece of glass in the helmet and then hang the pod off the ceiling so that we could have some really realistic movement acting upon the main character when the parachute opens. We did some testing and it was only abandoned in favour of a more simple approach a week or so before we were going to shoot. - Ferand Peek